Page 14 of The Dangerous Dance

"She told me off for that too," he says finally.

"Good."

"She's got a mouth on her."

"She's ours," I say. "Where do you think she got it."

Something happens to his face then. Not quite a smile — Declan doesn't come to smiles easily — but the thing before a smile, the loosening that happens when a face remembers it knows how. "She told me that if I didn't get my head out and start working with you properly she was going to make it her personal project to be so aggressively present in both our lives simultaneously that we'd have no choice but to get along out of self-defense."

I stare at him.

He almost smiles. "I believe her."

"So do I."

He stands, which means the part of this conversation he was willing to have is finished. This is also Declan — he'll come to the table, put something down, and need to leave before it gets processed any further. I've learned not to push past the leaving.

"The south distribution plan," he says, at the door.

"Bring it to me."

He nods and goes.

I find Mackenzie in the kitchen an hour later, which is where I find her most mornings, because she runs on coffee the way some cars run on fumes. She is leaning against the counter with a mug and her phone and the expression of someone who is pretending very hard to be simply present in a room rather than waiting for a specific person to arrive in it.

I get coffee. I lean on the counter next to her.

"Declan came to see me," I say.

"Mm." She looks at her phone.

"He told me you visited him."

"I brought food." She drinks her coffee. "The men at the east building are very polite, by the way. You've trained them well. Except for the one with the red hair who looked at me for slightly too long — you might want to have a word about that."

"Mackenzie."

"Liam."

I look at her. She looks back at me with the expression she's had since she was a child — the one that means she's done a thing and knows she's done a thing and has prepared for both gratitude and annoyance. "You went and got the real version out of him," I say.

"I went and visited my brother," she says carefully.

"You debriefed Declan."

"That sounds very official for what was essentially a conversation over pasta."

"Kenzie." I set my mug down. "What exactly did he tell you."

She sets her phone down too, which means we're doing this properly. "He told me about Connolly. And Brennan. He told me what they've been saying to him — that the Italian alliance is a takeover in slow motion, that you're trading Irish autonomy for Italian protection, that in five years we'll be operating as a subsidiary rather than a family." She holds my gaze. "And he told me that part of him believed it. Not all of him. But part."

"Because they've been feeding it to him for months."

"Because he's been alone with it for months," she says, with the precision that makes me remember she is not only Declan's sister but mine, and she applies the same unsparing clarity to both of us. "He doesn't talk to you. He doesn't talk to Ailish — not really, not about this. He sits with Connolly and Brennan, who have their own agenda, and he lets it ferment." She pauses. "You should have someone around him who isn't them."

"I'm aware of that."

"Someone he trusts. Someone who can give him a different version of events without it feeling like a lecture from you or a management exercise from Ailish."